Dr Bridget Penman

About

Dr Bridget Penman is Fellow and Tutor in Biology at St Peter’s College and Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Oxford. Dr Penman studied Biological Sciences at St Hugh’s College, Oxford and then went on to obtain a DPhil in what was then Oxford’s Department of Zoology (now the Department of Biology). Following her doctoral studies, she received a Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship and was Junior Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford. In 2016, Dr Penman became an Assistant (later Associate) Professor at the University of Warwick School of Life Sciences, where she worked until joining Oxford in October 2024. 

Teaching

In College, Dr Penman will provide tutorials on a range of biological topics to first-year St Peter’s biologists, and will teach quantitative methods and data handling to St Peter’s biologists in years 2-4 (as well as supporting them to find specialist tutorials relevant to their interests from colleagues across the University). In the Biology Department, she will deliver teaching relating to infectious diseases, host genetics and One Health.

Research

Dr Penman’s research focuses on infection genetics, in particular how the genetic makeup of an individual affects the severity of the infections they experience. She uses mathematical and computational models to study how pathogens and their hosts evolve in a range of different systems. While she is especially interested in malaria, she also wants to uncover general rules of infection genetics.

She recently showed that contrasting human evolutionary adaptations to the two major human malaria parasites Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax could be a consequence of the way immunity is gained to the two different species (Penman and Gandon, 2020, PloS Computational Biology). The Academy of Medical Sciences awarded her a Springboard Grant in Springboard Round 7 to pursue research into immunogenetics.

Publications

To learn more about Dr Penman’s publications, view her Google scholar page here.